


Auto-Contrivance

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV Sherlock Holmes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 01:21:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1839217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My blood runs as drily as sand and joints of me are forever breaking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Auto-Contrivance

So, ‘machine’. Yes. Maybe I am. I am the creation of - something - evolution at her finest, look into my eyes and tell me I am made of metal and electricity, tell me I’m not warm to the touch. We’re all made of stardust if you just look small enough, so perhaps I am a machine of the universe and me - these cells - in every and any form, will forever be recycled; I’m waste, we all are, so forget the stars for now and remember where you’re supposed to stand.

You’re right, you’re so right. If you were to open my chest with your neat surgeon’s fingers you’d find stainless steel and screws and cogs that all are choreographed so expertly and precisely to create what you so carelessly paint me as. When you look into my eyes they stare blankly and unseeing back at you. When you hurt me I don’t have the capacity to feel anything at all.

You must understand that I am different. I hide my vulnerabilities differently and I protect myself - yes - arrogantly, so you see everything deflecting from my skin when really it buries itself miles under the surface. I only manipulate for a gain, like anyone else, and I lie, I create masks; I’m just better at it than most.

Machines are made with purpose, so what is mine? To hurt you - you specifically? To endanger myself and those I love? To never care about any consciousness other than my own?

I think the only way which proves I am not as animatronic and as unfeeling as you expect me to be is that when you flung the words so inelegantly towards me, something inside my chest _burned._

You, of all people, must realise that for me to let someone in so far with all their inadequacies and knitwear and warm palms is somewhat a miracle in itself. I bleed. I have a heart, a warm tongue, a nervous system. And I wish I could (let you in further, let you see that - see me - so you finally understand who I am - fully - as much as I can pull your intricacies apart because I simply wouldn’t want to with anyone else) hide myself forever in the darkness just astride from the moon past 10PM on that Thursday evening where we sat on the roof and you let me smoke and the night grew cold around our silence. Later we climbed into the flat again from the skylight on the landing and you ate dry crackers and I lay slanted on the sofa cushions with my eyes closed as I listened to you and the steady hum of pointless television and thought of the tiny, dark strip of complete nothing beside that lump of rock orbiting us and our lives and wondered what it would be like to lay hidden there.

I can’t help this. I can’t help that you see me this way and I can’t help wanting you to know me more than now. I’ve let you in this far that I don’t think I can distance myself again. Your tongue can cut like knives but whatever it carves, I’ll always crave it. We were - we are - the greatest irreversible reaction I ever discovered. Or perhaps we were the worst. I can’t get you out of my skin.

I’m not a machine in the conventional sense. Look at my mind through my eyes which are scarred onto the moon.

So I realise now, as self destructive as this is, I realise that I am. I am a machine and the purpose of my existence (from one indeterminable point in our past to the changing possibility of future) is you.


End file.
